The Confederate Torpedo

One of the great points of debate among Confederate leaders during the Civil War was the use of “torpedoes” – what today we call mines – against Northern military naval forces, merchants and civilians. President Jefferson Davis, who thought they were unethical and cowardly weapons, was opposed to using them in almost every context. But many of his advisers felt otherwise, and as the Confederate war effort grew more dire in 1864, their calls became louder.

Davis’s opposition to torpedoes doesn’t mean they weren’t used; indeed, since the war began, Missouri Confederates, acting undercover along St. Louis piers, had been sabotaging Union shipping on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers by placing explosives in the firewood used for fuel on steamboats. Throughout the war, torpedo makers there and elsewhere in the South were honing their craft, looking for new ways to disguise their explosives – spurred on by a new Confederate law, passed in a secret congressional session, authorizing rewards for inventors of new waterborne technologies, including submersibles and mines.

One such innovation was the “coal torpedo,” an explosive device set in a block of cast iron “dipped in beeswax and pitch and covered with coaldust,” according to its inventor, the Belfast-born soldier Thomas Courtenay. The weapon was nefarious, designed to look for all the world like a pile of coal. Other advances included timer devices (the so-called horological torpedo), better fuses and more powerful explosive charges. None of this sat well with the technology’s opponents, but the exigencies of war won over Davis, who, though his secretary of war, James Seddon, issued strict rules that “passenger vessels of citizens of the United States on the high seas and private property on the water and [on] railroads or within the territory of the United States … not be subject of operations” using the torpedoes. Still, Seddon added, “The public property of the enemy may be destroyed wherever it may be found.”

Courtenay was soon authorized to employ up to 25 volunteers to cast and distribute an array of advanced torpedoes across the Confederacy. Since the volunteers would be outside the ranks of the army and navy, their pay was to come from the bounties authorized by the Confederate War Department. As warriors, they were in a murky legal category, likely more akin to privateers than guerrillas.

One of the first, and deadliest, uses of a Confederate torpedo came in City Point, Va., Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters and the Union Army’s primary logistics center during the siege of Petersburg. Located where the Appomattox River joins the James, City Point (present-day Hopewell) included landings, a huge warehouse divided into offices and sections for ammunition, commissary stores and rail facilities, which moved replacements, equipment, ammunition, provisions and livestock from transport vessels to Union soldiers in the trenches. Because City Point was close to the front, there was also a huge depot hospital – originally 1,200 tents, and later, as the siege wore on, 90 wooden buildings – and a “colored hospital” with physicians and surgeons, accompanied by volunteer nurses from the Union Army and Sanitary Commission.

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The City Point, Va. wharves immediately after the explosion.Credit Library of Congress

At the foot of a hill leading away from the piers sat a post office, express office, the quartermaster’s office, a Sanitary Commission post and sutlers’ establishments. A New York Tribune correspondent reported in the summer of 1864 that the hill was “a city of tents” with a dozen or so large frame structures on it, all being used by the Union Army.

In early August 1864, under orders from Brig. Gen. Gabriel Rains, head of the Confederate Torpedo Service, John Maxwell of the Confederate Secret Service left Richmond for Isle of Wight County, Va., with a box loaded with 12 pounds of explosives and a timer. On Aug. 9, after meeting with R. S. Dillard, another agent of the Confederate Secret Service who knew the lay of the land between eastern Tidewater and City Point, they traveled mostly by night , as Maxwell later wrote, “and crawled upon our knees to pass the east picket line,” closest to the wharf, warehouse, tents and hastily constructed buildings for the huge depot.

Once inside Union lines, Maxwell told Dillard to stay put about half a mile from the wharf. Maxwell continued the mission and found out that the captain of an explosives-laden barge at the wharf had left his vessel. When a sentinel stopped him on the wharf, Maxwell bluffed his way forward by saying the captain had ordered him to take a box containing “candles” aboard. Then, as Maxwell later said, “Hailing a man from the barge I put the machine in motion and gave it in his charge.” The man took it aboard with the clock ticking. Maxwell wasted no time in finding Dillard and heading toward the safety of higher ground.

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About an hour later, the ammunition barge, carrying between 20,000 and 30,000 artillery shells, exploded. The unnamed Tribune correspondent compared the blast to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. “Instead of lava and dust and ashes, it rained over the circle of a mile, in whole packages and by piece-meal, everything you can imagine in a military depot,” he wrote.

In his report, Maxwell said the explosion also destroyed another barge, most of the warehouse and the wharf running about a third of a mile into the river. “The scene was terrific, and the effect deafened my companion to an extent which he has not recovered.” Later estimates put the damage between $2 million and $4 million.

Between 50 and 300 people were killed, and at least 125 wounded. On the scene, the African-American war correspondent Thomas Morris Chester wrote, “Fragments of humanity were scattered around.” He added, “Those loudest in their grief were the contrabands who mourned their relatives and comrades. Being employed in great numbers when the accident occurred, more of them were wounded than any other class of individuals.”

No one knew what had happened. The following day the Tribune correspondent reported the suspected causes of the explosion, which ranged from careless handling of the explosives by the contrabands to an “old-time torpedo.” Some speculated that it was the work of a Confederate spy or a random shot.

Grant, who had been showered with dust and debris from the blast but was otherwise unhurt, remained undeterred. While his staff rushed to see what happened, he remained seated and calmly wrote out a telegram report on the strike to Washington. The explosion required the efforts of 1,000 laborers to clear away the debris, rebuild the warehouse and replace the long wharf. Nine days after the attack, the Union supply depot was back in business.

Sources: T.E. Courtenay to Col. Clark, Jan. 19, 1864, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion Navies; James Seddon to Courtenay, March 9, 1864, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion; Raimondo Luraghi, Paolo Coletta (trans.), “A History of the Confederate Navy”; Milton F. Perry, “Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare”; Horace Porter, “Campaigning with Grant”; Morris Schaff, “The Explosion at City Point,” in “Civil War Papers Read Before the Commandery of the State of Massachusetts.”

John Grady is a former editor of Navy Times and a retired director of communications at the Association of the United States Army. His biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury, Father of Oceanography will be published by McFarland in 2015. He is also a contributor to the Navy’s Civil War Sesquicentennial blog.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.